This MS Coast man has lived many lives. After decades in athletics, he returns to writing

James W. Miller of Diamondhead was in eighth grade when he began his career as a writer.

Now, at the age of 76, his third book was published earlier this year.

It’s about a little-known smuggler who indifferently pushed the U.S. closer into the Spanish-American War, a conflict which was one of the first dominoes to fall leading to America’s emergence as a global power. The book is called “King of the Gunrunners.”

The book has nothing to do with any of his previous books. Or previous jobs. He’s worked for newspapers, in the National Football League’s press relations team, as an administrator for the New Orleans Saints, the Buffalo Bills and the Chicago Bears and was fifth athletic director of the University of New Orleans.

He moved to the Coast at the end of his tenure with UNO . The school was unrecognizable after Hurricane Katrina, he said. He bought the most expensive plot of land, at the time, off the golf course of Diamondhead’s country club. He and his wife built their home from nothing atop that plot.

In 2018, Miller was interviewed for a story by the Wall Street Journal about his exercise routine. After hip surgery, he says he doesn’t go on multi-mile jogs anymore, but he does frequently go on morning walks with his wife, Jean. He also still regularly golfs.

“I really enjoy it here,” Miller said of the Coast and his home. “It’s just a great location. I’ve got in with a group of other bad golfers and we have a great time.”

Many lives lived

Miller, who often goes by Jim, is a native of Shelby County, Kentucky. He began writing as a correspondent for his local newspaper, The Shelby News, at the end of middle school. He impressed his editors enough they kept him on to cover sports for his high school when he made the jump.

“The pay was wonderful,” Miller said. “ Ten cents an inch. They paid me however much I wanted to write. I had stuff in the paper every week.”

During senior year, his high school made it to the state championship and won. Covering it was a trip, he said..

He went onto college at the University of Kentucky where he eagerly worked at the Kentucky Kernel, the university’s student paper.

He made strides in his career there. One of his early assignments involved talking to Kentucky’s legendary Adolph Rupp , now a Hall of Fame basketball coach. Miller was just 18 years old then, he said. He still gets shivers. At the Kernel, he rose the ranks to become the editor-in-chief by his senior year of college.

He started working for Louisville’s newspaper, the Courier-Journal after college, and he was drafted for Vietnam. “I didn’t really want to get shot at,” Miller said, so he joined the Army Reserve for six years.

A brief journalism education course at Temple University, run by the Wall Street Journal, sent him on the trajectory to the Baltimore Evening Sun , where he eventually worked for 10 years. He moved there after his commitment with the Army and the Courier-Journal was over. He spent five years on the copy desk and the remainder of his time there covering the Baltimore Colts , “the real Colts,” Miller said.

Miller took that beat because he wanted to get back into writing. It’s the same reason years later he’d become an author.

Then suddenly one of his contacts reached out to offer him a drink. It was unusual, he said, because that was usually his job as a reporter.

The contact told him the NFL was looking to hire a labor relations specialist ahead of what would eventually become the 1982 player’s strike .

He was hired on the grounds of being a good writer with a plethora of media contacts.

It wasn’t called press relations, or PR, back then, but that’s what it was, Miller said.

“‘The truth as we know it,’ is what I had to write,” he said. “The guys I used to write with, they’d call me and ask ‘What are you selling now!?’”

The Saints, Bills, Bears and UNO

Miller’s time with the NFL gave him insight into player contracts and how to manage them – before there were salary caps. Its administration was clever, he said.

It taught him how to run an NFL-like business.

He got the chance when Tom Benson bought the New Orleans Saints in 1985. Benson cleaned house and was committed on turning “The Aints” into a respectable team. At that time, Miller said, the team had gone 18 years without a winning season.

Miller was hired as the team’s administrative vice president. He managed contracts, the payroll and oversaw other departments.

By Year 2 under Benson’s ownership, the team finished 12-3. Five years later, Miller would be bumped up to executive vice president when his boss, two-time NFL Executive of the Year and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Finks, died from cancer. That made Miller the Saints’ chief administrative officer.

When salary caps were adopted, Miller was positioned to be one of the leading experts.

He was fired, he said, when there was another housecleaning. The “NFL means not for long,” he said.

He was able to get an administrative job with the Buffalo Bills almost immediately after leaving the Saints, thanks to industry contacts. He was there for two years before moving to Chicago for another administrative role with the Bears.

The work was starting to lose interest for him.

“The agents were getting younger, in the sense that they were smarter than I am. The money was getting bigger,” Miller said. “I was just really getting burned out.”

His wife, who he’d met when he was with the Saints, asked if they could move the family back to New Orleans.

Miller made the move to New Orleans at the end of his contract with the Bears without a job lined up, he said. “ But fortunately, God takes care of idiots and young children.”

He became the athletic director of the University of New Orleans. It was January of 2003, Miller said. UNO was still part of the LSU system.

“Those first two years were the best job ever,” he said. “You’re not dealing with athletes who thought they were worth the world. You’re dealing with kids, young athletes, none of whom are probably going pro.”

He said those student-athletes had heart and were genuine. They were there because they were fortunate, and they knew that. They also tried in school.

As athletic head, he oversaw all sports, exposing him to athletics he’d never really dealt with, like volleyball and track and field.

“I went to every event,” he said. “It was just really, really good to see them play.”

When Hurricane Katrina hit, his whole world was submerged. It was unclear if UNO would return as a school at all, he said. What was the best job he’d ever had became a struggle to save the work he’d built toward.

UNO would return, but it was different. Miller said the university’s enrollment still hasn’t reached pre-hurricane numbers.

He fought to keep as many sports as possible. Eventually he settled on six that would keep the university a part of the Sun Belt Conference, maintaining its NCAA presence. The school went from 16 teams to six.

A rift formed between Miller and his boss because he didn’t believe the university was dedicating enough resources to athletics. After a number of budget cuts, he said, it seemed not to be prioritizing its athletic mission.

He retired in 2010, saying it was time to pass the torch.

“It was a great life, great life,” Miller said. “Great growing up.”

By James W. Miller

Miller returned to writing. He moved to Diamondhead seven years ago. The short drive from New Orleans was one of its greatest appeals. Lots of his wife’s family lives nearby.

He’d thought for a long time Diamondhead was just a weekend retreat for NOLA’s retired folks. He quickly understood the appeal.

The first of Miller’s books, “Where the Water Kept Rising,” debuted in 2012.

The book catalogs his account of Hurricane Katrina.

It outlines Miller’s love for nurturing young, ambitious athletes and how after the storm, he had to fight to keep a fraction of UNO’s athletics at all.

To this day, he fears the school may finally cut athletics altogether.

The book is told through Miller’s and his family’s perspective. He highlights a few athletes whose stories were affected by the storm and the changes to the school.

In 2017, his sophomore book, “Integrated,” would be published. In it, Miller recounts the disappearance of a sparsely-remembered neighboring Black high school in Shelby County.

The basketball team of the school, called the Lincoln Institute, swept its all-white neighbors in 1960 for the regional title. It had a legacy of turning out competitive athletes and scholars.

Its downfall would be integration in 1975, where the school all but disappeared.

King of the Gunrunners

Published earlier this year, “King of the Gunrunners” began as a fictional story set in the late nineteenth century.

It started as a dip into fiction, Miller said. He wrote about it because that’s what he was interested in.

Miller modeled its protagonist after an ambitious young adult. He used old newspaper clippings for reference, pages of the so-called yellow press from the turn of the twentieth century.

Slowly he kept rereading one particular name – John D. Hart. He pulled together enough records that he told his agent the book’s scope was changing; it was going to be a nonfiction book about Hart.

“I didn’t have to make it all up,” he said jokingly.

Miller said Hart was a morally ambiguous smuggler who ferried fruit, munitions and sometimes revolutionaries to “Isla Juana,” the colonial name of Spanish Cuba.

Cuba had been a colony for roughly 400 hundred years, and after decades of exploitation and mismanagement, its residents wanted independence.

William Randolph Hearst ’s New York Journal took a particularly sympathetic interest in Hart, portraying him as a patriot and promoting American values abroad. In reality, Miller said, that was an exaggeration. Hart was an outlaw who’d smuggle anything deemed profitable. He’s a gray character who’d be jailed and pardoned by the government.

Hart’s smuggling runs would predicated American involvement in Cuba. For that reason, he was one of the figures who unknowingly and indifferently pushed for American involvement in the country.

The government would eventually dispatch two vessels to protect American interests in Cuba. Spurred on by individuals like Hart. One of them would be the infamous U.S.S. Maine.

To create the book and pull images, Miller spoke with Hart’s descendants. They provided him photos and some familial context. He also pulled information from the Library of Congress and National Archives.

“Well, it’s just my interests,” Miller said. “It’s what I like.”

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